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Saikai NPKujukushima, Nagasaki
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Hisaka’s windy slopes keep camellia trees low enough to climb for their seeds. Harvesters wore a garment called a *tonza*, with room in its body and sleeves to carry the crop.
The Former Gorin Church began life in Hamawaki in 1881. In 1931, its dismantled timbers were carried by raft to Gorin, where steep cliffs made the sea the easiest way to reach the hamlet.
At Tanoura Bay, Christians who had migrated to Hisaka and their Buddhist neighbors worked together to haul seine nets for fish such as *kibinago*. A surviving winch station, or *rokuroba*, preserves evidence of that shared work.
In 1868, more than 200 Christians were confined for 8 months in a cell of just 12 tatami mats. 39 died in custody and 3 after release; the persecution on Hisaka helped spark the wider Gotō Kuzure.
From 1797, Hidden Christians from Sotome moved to Hisaka under an agreement between the Ōmura and Gotō domains to open farmland. Their hamlets often lay beside Buddhist villages, whose residents shared farming and fishing work with them.
From the outside, the Former Gorin Church can look like a simple Japanese wooden house. Inside, its three-aisle layout, rib-vaulted ceiling and Gothic-style altar reveal a very different architectural world.
When a new church opened beside the Former Gorin Church in 1985, the old building was slated for demolition. Local believers and supporters helped save it; it was donated to the city and preserved.
Hisaka’s camellia crop was once part of the domain’s tax economy: the Fukue domain collected seeds as a minor levy not only from farmers, but also from townspeople, artisans, foot soldiers and boat captains, then sold them in Osaka.
Stone pieces from 9 pagoda monuments have been identified at 4 Hisaka locations, with dates ranging from the late 14th to early 17th centuries. Their distribution points to Hisaka’s place in older sea-trading networks.
Beginning in 2002, Hisaka residents cleared a mountainside, made a path and built the Orikami lookout themselves. Their community project received a national “Handmade Hometown” award in 2006.
Hisaka’s sheltered inner bay has gentler slopes suited to rice terraces; its steep, ocean-facing coast fostered smaller hamlets where people farmed and fished. The island’s striking settlement pattern follows the terrain.
Each autumn, worshippers and pilgrims from Goto and beyond gather at the site of the Rōya no Sako persecution for a memorial festival honoring those who died there.
